Read Along With Allen West

Good news, bibliophiles! Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) has come to free you from the tyranny of the New York Times best-seller list and all other scholarly research surrounding popular reading materials.

During an interview with Edward Hudgins, the Atlas Society director of advocacy, West strokes the objectivist outfit by proclaiming Ayn Rand’s ideological opus “Atlas Shrugged” to be the near be-all and end-all of literary creation.

“I think the book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is the most widely read book, second only to the Bible, which is a good thing,” West declares at roughly the 6:40 mark.

While this may be true around Chez West, we found no such record of Rand’s publishing dominance.

Rand does show up on SuperScholar’s “50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years” — just not as a leading contender. “Atlas Shrugged” is middle-of-the-pack material (33), somewhere between Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” (30) and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (36).